by Darrin Doyle
17.
Audrey gummed her first ball of Play-Doh under big sister McK-enna’s supervision. It was purple. McKenna didn’t try to stop her as she stuffed it into her mouth. Audrey was delighted, squealing. The Play-Doh softened, and baby Audrey drooled some of it onto the carpet. She swallowed the rest. Her gums turned the color of an eggplant. McKenna saw the joy it brought Audrey and began sliding pea-sized bites between Audrey’s lips when no one else was around.
Their mother had given instructions on this exact topic. She’d sat down with McKenna and Toby after Audrey was born and said, “Babies like to put things in their mouths. That’s how they discover the world. But she shouldn’t eat things that aren’t food. She could choke. You need to be big for Momma and tell me if you ever see her putting something bad in her mouth.”
At eight months, Audrey was crawling with confidence, a military-style dragging of her lower body, using her forearms. She investigated all corners, her yawning hole leading the way. Nothing bad in her mouth nothing bad in her mouth. This phrase spun like the hamster’s wheel in McKenna’s head.
Audrey grabs one of Murray’s mechanical pencils: “No, Audrey.”
Audrey grabs a candle: “Yucky, Audrey.”
An Army man: “Not for babies, Audrey.”
A spool of thread: “No, Audrey.”
She would feed Audrey a couple of nibbles of Play-Doh to tide her over. Then the phrase returned: Nothing bad in her mouth nothing bad in her mouth.
By the time Audrey was one year old, McKenna was tired of saying “no.” Audrey had been eating Play-Doh for months with no ill effects. One afternoon, McKenna found her baby sister on the floor of McKenna and Toby’s room. Audrey’s hair was a mass of tight yellow coils that reached her shoulders. Her oral cavity was packed with black goo that had once been a Crayola. Rather than prying open her jaws, reaching in to pull out the foreign material, calling for help, watching Audrey’s face collapse into a confused jumble of sadness and betrayal, hearing the paroxysm of wailing that blamed McKenna and begged her for a return to pleasure—rather than performing any of these actions, McKenna decided to sit on the carpet and see what happened.
Audrey swallowed the goo. Then she crawled to a nearby book (one of the Choo-Choo Charlie series, if memory serves—which it does, again and again) and tried to eat a page. McKenna wrapped her arms around Audrey’s gut and repositioned her so she faced the open door. Audrey crawled out of the room, slapping her hands on the wooden floor, joyous, wanting McKenna to chase. She did.
The rest of the day, McKenna waited anxiously, expecting her sister to die. Bites of Play-Doh were one thing, but a crayon, paper and all, was frightening. And what awful timing. Dad was almost finished with the top secret feet that he never discussed but that he spent every night in the basement perfecting, the new feet for Audrey, an entire year’s labor, an entire year of neglecting his twins. This would be the worst time for Audrey to die, before she could even try the feet, before she could walk upright and make Daddy smile. McKenna’s stomach kicked like an angry kangaroo. She watched Audrey crawl around the house. She held Audrey’s hands and helped her do a wobbly stump-walk into the living room.
After six hours passed and Audrey continued to breathe, McKenna decided that she wouldn’t die. No, she would become a vegetable. McKenna had seen a TV movie titled Who’s Killing the Stuntmen? in which a mustachioed guy with a gentle demeanor and seaweed-green eyes not unlike McKenna’s, jumped from the top of a skyscraper. But somebody had tampered with his air cushion. It didn’t properly break his fall. The stuntman became a “vegetable” in a hospital bed. His face was expressionless. Tubes snaked out of his arms and throat. His wife, despondent, held his hand. She talked to him, but he wasn’t there.
A person could be alive in body while dead in mind—a hor-rific revelation. During McKenna’s intense mental probing of the subject, she could think of no reason that eating a crayon couldn’t also turn a person—especially a baby, so vulnerable—into a pale, lifeless thing that only stared, blinked, and breathed.
Four hours later, Audrey lay asleep in her crib. Misty scuffled into the living room to watch Dallas, easing into the recliner without a word about Audrey’s black gums. Hadn’t she noticed? Did she even care? McKenna was finally able to relax . . . sort of.
From that day on, she spent a portion of her allowance at the corner drug store. Packs of forty-eight crayons cost $1.99. When she caught a moment alone with Audrey, McKenna would pull one from her sock and hand it to her sister, her stomach aching with nerves and another sensation, unfamiliar but not unpleasant, located in the same area of her gut. Audrey’s hand, attached to a wild, jerky arm, reached for the crayon. Her brow scrunched in concentration. When at last the waxy stick was in her grip, she would “AHHHH AHHHH,” showing all five of her teeth and punching herself in the legs with excitement. McKenna wanted to know what Audrey was experiencing, so she once took a few nibbles. It tasted similar to the overcooked carrots Misty served. McKenna doubted there was any difference in color-flavor, but for some reason, Audrey had an affinity for black. McKenna became skilled at cleaning the evidence during baths, and Audrey never complained about the soap in her mouth.
18.
The years at St. Monica were marked by prayers, beatings, and halitosis. In fourth grade, it was Sister Peter Verona, a wisp of a woman whose habit framed a sullen, heavy-browed, fuzzy-lipped face. Pee Vee, as the students called her, weaved prayers throughout the day. Mornings started with an Our Father, a Hail Mary, a Gloria, an Apostles’ Creed, and an Act of Faith. Schooldays ended with the same, but in reverse order and with an added Memorare and Prayer for the Pope. But it was after recess when Pee Vee truly got the children to reach for God. Fifteen solid minutes of invocation, including a song lead by her delicate falsetto: “I have been a naughty child/Naughty as can be/Now I am so sorry Lord/Won’t you pardon me?”
McKenna felt sure that she hadn’t been naughty. She’d been, in fact, a model child compared to Toby. She’d resisted the pressure to take a hit from the Kool cigarette Toby had stolen from Murray’s jacket pocket and invited a circle of boys to smoke in the woods behind the baseball diamond. McKenna’s refusal had been mocked, while Toby, eyes narrowed, self-assured in his corruption, dared McKenna to nark on him as he dragged deeply.
McKenna was a good daughter, and a damn good one at that. She obeyed her parents without fail, even her father’s nonsensical demands.
“Cut the yard after dinner, McKenna, but son of a Band-Aid, don’t be so noisy about it,” Murray said. “I’m trying to concentrate downstairs, with power tools.”
Having cut the grass a half-dozen times, McKenna couldn’t recall any volume knob on the lawnmower. Toby smirked from across the table, bit a green bean.
Misty scooped potatoes onto her plate. “What your dad means is that maybe you could wait to cut the grass until he’s done working.”
“That’s not what I mean, Mist. Don’t speak for me, please.”
“I want a cold meatloaf,” Audrey said. She sat poised on her knees in a grownup chair. She two-handed a plastic glass of milk to her mouth and drank deeply, with noisy gulps.
“Just don’t rev the damn thing, McKenna. And when you turn a corner, don’t raise the blades off the ground.” Murray stabbed a hunk of loaf with his fork. “The sound gets really loud when you do that. Think about it.”
“Don’t rev the mower, dummy,” Toby said.
“I want a soap,” Audrey said.
Misty frowned. “Your sister is not a dummy. Say you’re sorry.”
“Sorry, dummy.”
McKenna cut the grass with hedge clippers. It took two hours, but it made no noise. Crickets jumped at her hands. The neighborhood was veiled by twilight. The air was chilly. She snipped away, on her knees. Now and then, she looked up at the house. On the second story, a light glowed behind the curtain in Audrey’s room, and McKenna wondered if she should be saving the grass clippings.
So McKenna hated to sing
the naughty child song. She also hated the way Pee Vee thrust her face five inches from hers when visiting desks to check homework. “Do you really think Michigan is the second biggest state?!” The raw blast of onions, coffee, bologna, boiled cat—Who knew what went in that slit of a mouth?—choked McKenna. She tried not to inhale. And there was another odor, too, one that she’d also detected on Grandma Pencil’s breath. A sweet, curdled stench.
Perhaps it was food caught in her teeth. Perhaps it was the decay of her gums. Perhaps it was the rot of heart, lungs, stomach—that general wind of death that stirs inside every old person.
In private, the kids called Pee Vee “Muck Mouth,” “Garbage Pail,” and “Sewer Breath.” They imagined what was hidden beneath her veil. They envisioned a crew cut, a scarred, dimpled piece of head fruit. They tried to understand how, even in an afterlife of pillowy clouds and golden loving forgiveness, this woman could ever stand close to God. With her foul insides, hidden disfigurements, and cruel eyes, surely she would be cast out and left to flop like a fish upon the hard dirt of damnation.
Pee Vee, and all of the nuns at St. Monica, took great plea sure in humiliating the children; in separating them into groups (the “fast,” the “average,” and the “slow”; the slow group banished to a table in the back of the classroom); in slapping the boys on the ears; in quivering with rage while dragging a troublemaker like Toby to the front of the room and forcing him to sit on the carpet, facing the chalkboard. The nuns took plea sure in demanding an apology and, when not receiving one, pummeling his spine and shoulder blades with an open hand, the dull thumps echoing off the chalkboard, the globe, and the poster of the girl handing the wheelchaired boy an apple, with the caption, The fruit of kindness is the sweetest fruit. The air was forced from Toby’s lungs in shallow expulsions. His face crimsoned, and his cheeks jiggled. He fought back tears. His lips formed a smile—one without happiness but certainly with plea sure.
Sister Pee Vee was followed by Sister Michael, Sister Maximil-lian, Sister Pat, and Sister Robert Ann. All sadistic, all on missions to uncover evildoers. Like a squad of superheroes whose special powers were never bending to another’s will, never apologizing, and living to the age of one thousand. The nuns were a ruddy, sexless creature of one mind. They had traded individuality and womanhood for unfettered power. They were gnarled trees, eyesores that nobody could chop down. Axes would shatter; saw teeth would break loose and twinkle upon the ground in the winter sunlight.
19.
The house is a two-story (three if you count the unfinished basement; four if you count the attic, carpeted with insulation). It was built in the 1920s. The white paint has aged to oatmeal gray. A narrow cement path connects the sidewalk to the front stoop. Climbing the four stairs, which are cratered like a teenage boy’s face, one will meet a white, universal hinge, crossbuck metal storm door. Open it and you’ll be standing inside a screen-enclosed porch. This 6' × 12' area is littered with junk—a metal gas can; a dozen empty ceramic planters; a hoe and a rake; a bucket filled with screws, nails, washers, and bolts; a ten-pound bag of salt; oil-spotted washrags piled in a corner; empty Faygo bottles; and so on. The porch screens are a dense weave and let in little air or light; a few of the bottom corners of the screens have been torn open by squirrels who want warmth, muffin crumbs, or a sniff of the oily rags.
The door shrieks when you walk into the house. There is no mat to wipe your feet on. You stand in a narrow foyer on hardwood the color of baked bread. In front of you is a staircase with a polished, peat brown banister. To your left is a coat rack mounted on the wall. Turn to your right and view the living room, which is not large and feels even smaller because of the cramped arrangement of furniture. There is a loveseat and a dumpy sofa. A glass coffee table covered with Popular Mechanics magazines. A mustard recliner in the shadow of a skinny floor lamp. A low bookshelf holds books and a 1211 television. To your left is the dining room, where a rectangular table is surrounded by six wooden chairs. Beyond the table are the swinging saloon-style doors to the kitchen.
Push through these doors, go to the kitchen sink, and peer out the window. You’ll see that the backyard is a 15' × 15' square, bounded on three sides—on your right by a one-car garage, badly flaking; in the middle by a six-foot wooden fence (a section of which leans precariously inward); and on the left by a row of bushes sheared roughly level with the fence.
Many are already familiar with this yard, this house (the exterior, anyway). These people hail from all quarters of the United States and the world—Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Phoenix. Athens, Georgia and Athens, Greece. Pamplona, Spain and Knob Lick, Kentucky.
In first gear, their rented Plymouth Grand Voyagers ease down the hill of Moriarty Street, two-thousand pounds of steel rivaling the top speed of a riding mower. The wife squints out the passenger window, searching for house numbers. She points, excited. Her husband parallel parks two feet from the curb and stomps the emergency brake to the floor. On such an incline, he won’t take any chances. Hesitantly, they deboard the vehicle, scoping out the surroundings, surprised at the neighborhood, surprised that This, really? is the landmark they’ve read about. They clutch their pocketbooks and cameras in two-fisted grips, “boip-oip!” the locks, and then double-check, just to be safe, by tugging on the handles.
When they spot Oscar Foster raking his tiny yard a few houses up the street, they relax a bit. Oscar is in his seventies, widowed—a nonthreatening man. Although he’s not exactly high society in his flip-flops, black socks, and ratty bathrobe, Oscar is Caucasian. His roundness, moreover, isn’t vulgar (more of a Santa-esque shape, not unlike their own). His presence assures them that although the neighborhood is not glamorous, they will probably not be jumped by dark-skinned hooligans before they snap a couple of digital photos of the infamous Mapes home.
Perhaps when they are showing these pictures at a cocktail party, an observant friend will lean in, squint, and say, “Is that a person? In the upstairs window?”
On closer inspection, it does look like a face. Or maybe it’s only a reflection, a trick of the light. Yes, it has to be. “After all,” they say, “we rang the doorbell five times.”
Long before this day, however—three presidents ago—when peering out the kitchen window at the backyard bounded by garage, fence, and bush line, you would often see Audrey Mapes, a pretty three-year-old in a yellow cotton dress, squatting near the garage, holding a plastic shovel.
She digs at the soft earth where the grass is thin. She works languidly, now and then sifting through piles of soil with her fingers, now and then taking a handful to her lips. She chews without expression. On her right, a robin has lighted atop the wooden fence. The robin studies her. Audrey imagines that the bird, with its expression, is asking, “Why eat dirt? Not even I eat dirt. Try a worm, Audrey.”
Audrey doesn’t want a worm. In fact, when she feels movement on her palm and looks down to see a wriggling, soil-caked earthworm, she startles.
She throws the handful of dirt against the side of the garage, where it rattles loose a few chips of white paint. Candy.
20.
Some people—the geezers especially—have called it a destruction of Biblical proportions, like Sodom and Gomorrah or the Big Flood. That’s retrospect talking, hindsight making things 20/20 when actually a little blurred vision is exactly what we all need.
The first point of contention: Kalamazoo was no den of sin, not even in the late 1990s. So the idea that the citizens were being admonished with destruction is ridiculous. Second point: God had already cleaned house in 1980 with a tornado that danced down Main Street and decimated the city to the tune of twenty million dollars. How much sin can redevelop in less than two decades? Rebuild first, sodomize and whore later—that’s the general rule.
In short, don’t buy the Biblical punishment theory. Unless, of course, God has evolved since the days when the Bible was written, and He now cares less about sex and gambling than irresponsible pollutants and a dearth of culture, ente
rtainment, and employment options. Which is certainly possible.
However, I prefer to think of Audrey’s feat as the slowest disaster ever recorded, the rare case of a natural force exhibiting a measure of personability. She was a tornado that lollygagged, that took extended cigarette breaks, that played Parcheesi with the folks whose lives were being erased. She was the atomic bomb, except this time the Hiroshimites gathered around the fireball as it swelled, set out lawn chairs, donned radiation-proof goggles,sipped hot sake, and commented upon the Armageddon between stifled yawns. She was the gentlest earthquake, the softest tsunami. The loveable time-lapse hurricane.
The main difference is that ultimately, Kalamazoo asked for this disaster. In writing.
21.
Toby’s transformation was a wonder to behold.
Both twins grew, of course. Their bones stretched. Hair sprouted. Feet strained against shoes. Pencil marks on the wall beside the bedroom door crept upward like the rungs of a ladder.
By age eleven, Toby needed a longer bed. Between fourth and seventh grade, his height increased by nearly a foot. McKenna grew a “measly” five inches. Toby’s weight doubled, to 170 pounds. He was quick to point out that it wasn’t fat. It was muscle. McKenna weighed eighty-nine pounds, just six pounds heavier than she’d been at age ten.
Toby was clearly Grandma Pencil’s favorite. While she defended and babied McKenna—doted on her, pitied her, coddled her like a puppy—she worshipped Toby. Here was a fine, robust young lad who could finish three cobs of corn, two helpings of mashed potatoes, and a pile of roast beef, and still have room for apple cobbler. Grandma’s memories of Toby as a finicky child, being bribed to eat his hot dogs, had long been forgotten. At age five, around the time physical measurements became an obsession, Toby had begun to love food. Or, if he didn’t actually love food—the taste of it, the sensuality of the morsels upon his tongue, the delicate popping of corncob kernels between his canines (and McKenna was certain that he didn’t; he didn’t love these things at all)—he definitely loved what food gave him. It made his body grow.